The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [11]
[Rockefeller] is the representative of a great system that has become a public enemy. The organization which he represents has been and is now a gigantic oppressor of the people. . . . [It is] abundantly clear that this great fortune has been built up by the transgression and the evasion of law and by methods which are at war with the first principles of morality. Are we, as Christians, forbidden to judge this sort of thing? I rather think it is our business to be swift witnesses against it.
Gladden, a Congregational minister, wrote influentially and entered politics in an effort to push reforms, serving for two years on the city council of Columbus, Ohio. Rauschenbusch, a Baptist, was a pastor in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City and a religious educator. They and others advanced an activist religious practice known as the Social Gospel, which called on believers to assert Christian principles in the here and now to support economic and social justice. Meanwhile, the needs of the poor and socially deprived inspired the founding of urban settlement houses, like Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, the Neighborhood Guild in New York, and Andover House in Boston, which brought some social services, education, and recreation to city slums.
Representing the interests of wage earners, the American labor movement began to coalesce as a force to contend with. By 1886, the broad-based Knights of Labor counted as members more than 700,000 skilled and unskilled workers. The movement progressed in fits and starts over ensuing decades of tumult and periodic crisis.
In a more visionary realm, writer-philosopher Edward Bellamy, Francis’ first cousin, imagined a society based on equitable distribution of resources. His best-selling 1888 novel, Looking Backward, tells a kind of Rip van Winkle story in which a man wakes up, in the year 2000, after a century of sleep to discover a world founded on mutual cooperation and concern, rather than competition. He finds a country that has been cleansed of its nineteenth-century flaws and transformed into a peaceful and thoughtful society free of unemployment, starvation, or poverty, and the state is the only employer. The change occurred gradually, without violence. A beneficent government controls capital and apportions the gross national product equally among all. Bellamy’s dream of institutionalized equity and brotherly love attracted a following of intellectuals and idealists who embraced the tenets of what came to be known alternately as Nationalism and Christian socialism. Among those active in promoting these ideas in speeches and published essays was Edward’s younger cousin, the future author of the Pledge of Allegiance, Reverend Francis Bellamy. (As we will see later, Francis, a fervent idealist, also shared some of the era’s crass prejudices.)
The single most far-reaching phenomenon of the era when the Pledge came into being was immigration. In 1892, the year the Pledge came to be, Ellis Island opened in New York Harbor as a processing center for people arriving by ship from Europe in ever-increasing numbers. The former naval munitions depot was converted at a cost of $500,000 to replace a smaller reception area in Castle Garden, a onetime fortification and amusement center in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. That facility had been overwhelmed. Between 1881 and 1890, the number of foreign-born people entering the United States had almost doubled compared to the previous decade—from 2.8 million to 5.2 million. (The aggregate foreign-born population in 1890 was more than 9 million, almost 15 percent of the national total, the biggest proportion ever. By comparison, in 2000, the Census Bureau counted 28.4 million people living in the United States who were born abroad, at 10 percent the highest proportion since 1930.)
Immigrants played a crucial role in the economy by helping to fill an ongoing need